Battle of the Linguist Mages

by Scotto Moore

Overview

“This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six... By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice... an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.” —New York Times

“It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross

In modern day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire.

Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced.

But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake.

Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250767721
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	1,143,060
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

SCOTTO MOORE is a Seattle playwright, whose works include the black comedy H.P. Lovecraft: Stand-up Comedian!, the sci-fi adventures Duel of the Linguist Mages and interlace [falling star], the gamer-centric romantic comedy Balconies, and the a cappella sci-fi musical, Silhouette. He is the creator of The Coffee Table, a comedic web series about a couple that discovers their new coffee table is an ancient alien artifact that sends their house shooting through the void. He is also behind the popular Lovecraft-themed meme generator, Things That Cannot Save You (“a catalog of your doom”), which spawned his novella, Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You. Moore's debut novel, Battle of the Linguist Mages, was met with widespread critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it "...an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind."

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/18/2021

Moore (Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You) takes readers on a roller coaster of weird in this wildly entertaining gonzo adventure. For the past eight years, Isobel Bailie has dominated the leaderboards of Sparkle Dungeon, a popular series of medieval rave-themed VR games. Her expertise and skill, especially with the game’s voice-based spell-casting system, earns her a job with Sparkle Dungeon’s PR firm as a senior marketing specialist. But her real assignment is to master “power morphemes,” a sequence of linguistic units capable of accomplishing a vast array of magical feats. That’s just the tip of an increasingly impossible iceberg, as Isobel learns that a conceptual thunderstorm is poised to destroy reality and winds up caught between a ruthless cabal of powerful people and a group of spell-casting anarchists, each with a conflicting plan to save the world. Moore’s tale, adapted from several of his earlier plays, is audacious, ambitious, and metatextual, packed with such wild concepts as sentient punctuation marks, musical weapons, and multilayered reality. While the story sprawls at times, Moore never loses sight of his characters’ humanity or the underlying sense of adventure and humor. Readers will love it as much for the outlandish ideas as for the narrative complexity and sense of fun. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

11/01/2021

Moore's first full-length novel (after the novella Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You) is a fantasy set in modern-day Los Angeles, focusing on a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that's has the potential to overpower and possibly destroy the physical world. Protagonist Isobel Bailie is the Queen of the Sparkle Dungeon, a role honed over years of play. She jumps at the chance to do user-testing for the game's next upgrade—until it turns out that it's Isobel who's being tested, to determine whether she can use her virtual powers to change the real world. It's a nightmare come true once she learns that others have already figured out how to use these powers for evil. Moore's novel ports the immersiveness of MMORPGs into reality through the power of language, while taking potshots at manipulative advertising, politicians who do very little while promising everything, and the titans of Silicon Valley who have more control over most people's lives than anyone likes to think. VERDICT The inventiveness and intensity of Moore's storytelling perfectly blends Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Readers who enjoy gaming will find the novel accessible and appealing.—Marlene Harris, Reading Reality, LLC, Duluth, GA

Library Journal

★ 2021-11-13
A champion virtual reality gamer gets tangled up in a real-life war between alien-powered magicians.

Isobel is the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon. The video game's best diva-caster—a player who uses her actual voice to sling spells—she wields the series' four most powerful artifacts. But when the Queen combines the artifacts' powers, she unwittingly rips a hole in the fabric of the game's spacetime. Still, nothing seems amiss when SparkleCo's ad agency reaches out to ask Isobel to test a new game. She is the Queen, after all, and no one can overtake her in the leaderboards. Working under the cover of a comprehensive nondisclosure agreement, Isobel learns that the ad agency is working on real-life magic: multilayered syllables that manipulate whomever hears them into feeling, thinking, or doing whatever the speaker wishes, thanks to the power of alien punctuation marks. Sparkle Dungeon's best diva-caster turns out to be a natural with these "power morphemes," but she begins to suspect that she isn't working for the good guys after meeting a few of the firm's other clients—including a Scientology-esque church and an "insidious" politician. Then there's her predecessor, Maddy, who left the ad agency after crafting her own set of morphemes and now wants to kidnap Isobel to work as part of her resistance movement. Maddy's explosive entrance cuts the novel's brake lines, pitching readers into a madcap adventure of magic and mayhem. Moore has produced a frenetic romp that makes up for its lack of depth with a whole lot of fun. Although Isobel never entirely comes together as a three-dimensional character, her funk-infused narration does a good job of fleshing out her supporting cast.

Glitter-bombed popcorn fiction at its finest.

Kirkus Reviews

This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six... By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice... an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.” —New York Times

“It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross

“Sparklepunk meets Snow Crash! One of those books that hits you with an amazing new idea every couple of pages, and it makes for a wild ride.” —Django Wexler

“A frenetic romp... a whole lot of fun... Glitter-bombed popcorn fiction at its finest.” —Kirkus STARRED REVIEW

“A roller coaster of weird in this wildly entertaining gonzo adventure... Readers will love it as much for the outlandish ideas as for the narrative complexity and sense of fun.” —Publishers Weekly


More praise for Scotto Moore:

“Scotto Moore understands a key truth about Ziggy Stardust: Rock and roll messiahs are really fucking scary.” —Kieron Gillen on Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

“Absolutely stunning. A fast-paced, psychedelic blur of music, tech, and things way beyond either. I picked it up, and it simply would not let me go until the final page was read.” —Ramez Naam on Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

“Moore writes with a playful jauntiness that buoys the growing darkness rather than undercutting it. His details about a certain subset of music nerds give the story some great texture... the ride is a fun one and the soundtrack is killer.” —Locus on Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

“A wickedly clever amalgam of science fiction, horror, and contemporary music that makes one reconsider whether Ziggy Stardust’s arrival here on Earth might not, in fact, be such a good thing... I could have read Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You in one sitting, but I stretched it over two nights because I couldn’t bear for it to end... Buy this book.” —Elizabeth Hand in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction on Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

“A lean, quick read with no fat. The clever, exciting story mixes weird fiction with an engaging and mysterious plot.” —Library Journal on Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

From the Publisher